Happy Friday! SmartContracting gets you ready for the weekend with today's rundown of the news you may have missed regarding our industry.
"Through the federal budget process, the George W. Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought - wrongly, it turned out -that contractors would be less expensive."
"It is true that core contract personnel are, on average, more expensive than their government counterparts. However, in some cases, contractor personnel are less costly, especially if the work is short-term in nature, easily available commercially, or requires unique expertise for immediate needs."
The July 20 Washington Post article questioning the intelligence community for tapping the vast array of private-sector talent to meet immediate intelligence needs after 9/11 glosses over the government’s most basic need: to respond with agility to changing threat environments.